Member News – November 16-January 17

We have a world of news to catch up on since our last update, which only goes to show that life can move pretty fast if you’re not paying attention (or if you just neglect your blog for several months over a very hot summer!)

World’s Finest!

One of the big ticket items on the speculative fiction calendar is the end of year proliferation of year’s best anthologies. This year CSFG have had a probably-record two entries in international volumes recognising the best S&SF of 2016:

Ian McHugh’s ‘The Baby Eaters’, originally printed in Asimov’s January 2016, will appear in in The Year’s Best Science-Fiction, Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois.

T.R. Napper (aka Tim)’s story ‘A Strange Loop’, originally printed in Interzone 262, will appear in Neil Clarke’s The Best Science Fiction of the Year – Volume 2.

Congratulations to Ian and Tim!

Australian Year’s Best

Ticonderoga Publications’ annual anthology of The Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror is another highlight of the Australian speculative community’s year. An impressive lineup of CSFG members have made the Table of Contents this year, including Rivqa and Cat’s stories from CSFG’s most recent anthology The Never Never Land.

Recommended Reading

Early in the new year, a number of sites post recommended reading lists, summarising what they consider the best and most notable works of the past year – and again, CSFG members have made appearances.

If that list isn’t long enough for you, you might also want to check out the Locus Online Recommended Reading List. It doesn’t have any CSFG members on it, but is still a useful collection of links to some excellent stories).

Anthology

Rivqa Rafael is co-editing an intersectional feminist spec fic anthology called Problem Daughters. Problem Daughters will amplify the voices of women who are sometimes excluded from mainstream feminism. It will be an anthology of beautiful, thoughtful, unconventional speculative fiction and poetry around the theme of intersectional feminism, focusing on the lives and experiences of marginalized women, such as those who are of colour, QUILTBAG, disabled, sex workers, and all intersections of these.

Other News

Satalyte Publishing

After all that good news, some bad: Satalyte Publishing went out of business early in the new year, which has sadly affected a number of CSFG members. Commiserations to Gillian Polack, Phill Berrie, Dawn Meredith and Chris Andrews, who all either had novels in print or were due to be published soon. (Especially Gillian, who has just had four books go out of print, including one that was only launched in September!)

Elizabeth Fitzgerald

Elizabeth is running a series of interviews with all the GUFF candidates. The first is with
Belle McQuattie, with others to follow. Don’t forget to cast your vote for a GUFF candidate, or just make a donation to support the cause, if you haven’t already!

Ross Hamilton

Ross has secured a semi-regular gig writing book reviews for The Big Issue. (The issue out this weekend contains one of his).

Gillian Polack

Gillian has also become (as far as this post editor is aware) the first CSFG member to launch a Patreon page to solicit support for her ongoing writing. Please consider pledging if you want to help fund Gillian’s ongoing writing – there are recipes (and also a treasure trove of Gillian’s previously unpublished juvenilia, recently recovered from a box)!

And finally, Gillian will be presenting a paper at Worldcon. What will it be about? You might have to go to Worldcon in Helsinki in August to find out!